Pleasures of the flesh often pop up unprompted in our thoughts (Image: Harry Gruyaert/Magnum Photos)
No one knows where the “men think about sex every 7 seconds” rumour comes from, but it’s almost certainly untrue. In 2012, Terri Fisher of Ohio State University in Columbus armed three groups of students with clickers and asked them to click whenever they thought about either sex, food or sleep.
The result: men thought about sex 19 times a day, while women did around 10 times. Food thoughts numbered 18 for men and 14 for women, and sleep 10 for men and 9 for women (Journal of Sex Research, vol 49, p 69).
So if those numbers square with your tallies, consider yourself normal (at least benchmarked to students in Ohio). Pleasurable things such as eating, sleep, sex, alcohol, socialising and shopping dominate our common spontaneous thoughts, according to another study by Wilhelm Hofmann, now at the University of Cologne – again of students, this time in Germany.
Darker topics are more problematic. Unless directly confronted by death – a close encounter with a truck or a suspicious lump – most of us almost never think of it. “Terror management theory”, developed in the 1980s, even suggests fear of death’s inevitability explains our obsession with immediate and pleasurable concerns.
Not everyone is convinced that existential angst underlies quite so much of the human experience. But we do know that around 15 per cent of people have “death anxiety”, a morbid obsession that is almost certainly a “non-optimal state of affairs”, says psychologist Sheldon Solomon, who co-developed terror management theory. Some research suggests it may underlie …
